And what any of you might ask, and some of you probably have asked, is how is this practice of noticing each appearance, localizing it, and seeing it in terms of impersonal, painful, and impermanent, or practicing with each appearance in relationship to the Four Noble Truths, how is this fit in with uncorrected mind, which is the basic practice of Zen? Has that occurred to anyone? It occurs to me. Okay. But, you know, I think it might be useful to look also at what we're doing in terms of the English words of religion and spirit, which we make a distinction between a person who, say, has a religious sense.

[01:21]

And I'm using religion in a positive way, not in religion is bad or it's just ceremonies or something like that. we can say genuinely, in a very positive way, about something that he or she is. A religious person has a religious sense. And we can also say such a person has a spiritual life. We don't mean the same as if they are religious. Now, these distinctions don't exist in Tibetan or Japanese. And just to make sure, I called up Jeffrey Hopkins an hour or so ago and talked to him and said, what are you... And then I called up Kaz, talked to him about Japanese, Tanahashi Sensei. And... But so I'd like to... Did any of you have any ideas? How would you define religion or religious and spiritual?

[02:24]

religion as an organized spirituality. Okay, yeah. Spiritualism is more individual. Yeah. Anyone else? Someone said that all the great religions of the world are leftovers of some great flaring of spirit that happened at one time. The dregs of realization. Yeah. You know, and sometimes the form, you know, you put the sticks together in the paper and sometimes all it takes is a little spark to get it together. I hope there's some sparks around here. Okay, good. Yeah. Anybody else? Do you actually have a spiritual experience in social, intellectual dimensions than you have in religion? So spiritual would be the seed, and then what comes from the seed would be religion.

[03:36]

Anyone else? I think of spiritual as there's a certain feeling or tone, like when you talk about tone in this room, to me that's spiritual. Okay. May I ask, David, your father is a minister, right? An Episcopal minister who... Church of England. Church of England, I'm sorry. Church of England, but he's also quite an unusual minister. Right. Yeah, or priest or minister. How would he define religion and spiritual? What do you think? I think he'd probably see or say that religion is a manifest practice or something which can involve anyone.

[04:48]

Otherwise... A spiritual practice is much more adept in some way. It involves a lot more discipline and self-exploration. So it's more personal. It's more personal. I think that's what it is. Okay. Would you say the same thing? Yes. In German, what are the words? Do you have the same distinction, religion and spiritual, in German? Hmm? Yeah? It's the same word. It's the same word? Religion, spirituality. Oh, it's the same words, yeah, yeah. Okay. I see spirituality as the part of religion that you can't grasp, you can't define.

[05:50]

Yeah, if you said an artist has a spiritual life, does that have anything to do with religion? Or can you say that? Here in America, it seems so that spirituality is more like a dance. A dance? Yeah, a dance with some kind of feeling which are higher than just eating and drinking. So they put it out as such a thing. It's very unusual, but I look at it when I meet people here. So you feel that in America you've sensed that people have a different feeling or something with the word spiritual than they do in Europe or in Germany. Mahakavi, what do you think? Well, you haven't been in America long enough to know.

[06:57]

My feeling is that in Germany the word spirit is more used in a closer sense. In a what sense? It's closer, it's smaller. Smaller? Yeah, in a smaller sense. And not as an artist perform something that wouldn't name the spirit. I see, yeah. Okay. What comes into my mind is that If I look at the word spiritual, it means mind and it means exhale. And it might have been connected to religion in the early days or kind of a source. But I agree somehow with David that it's a more personal practice. then it somehow doesn't have a social base like religion does have, an organized base.

[08:07]

I'm actually trying to put myself in my father's shoes. I think that he would call people in his church religious if they actually manifested in their works what they did for the church and how they actually presented their spirituality to the world through the medium of Christianity. But it's fair to say that your father would be a more spiritual minister than most ministers who are more religious. So he would emphasize the spiritual side of religion being manifested in the church. Right, exactly. But he would also call the person religious, who didn't necessarily have anything to do with that. With the spiritual side. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Spiritual, I think, is that which a person needs to live to survive and cannot live without it.

[09:16]

It is intensely personal. In a Western perspective, when I think of spirit, in its Jewish sense. I think of Christ walking in Jerusalem. When I think of religion, I think of the edifice which came afterwards and which serves a purpose which goes beyond the intensely individual. I think when we sit and practice the Zazen, we do so out of the compelling need of the spiritual. I think in a sense, when the artist creates that textural, the poet writes his poem, or a great work of music is produced, we're all drinking of the spiritual. I don't have a name for it, but it's something which is real. Religion is the edifice which tries to grasp it and so often fails. When we sit in Zazen here, we... seeking that spiritual thing, not simply to be a member of a religion.

[10:26]

Okay. Spirit is also taught in this country, the great spirit, the Indian, that now... Yeah. It's also, spirit is, as you said, it comes from breath. When I thought about spirituality... The root of the word comes from breath, yeah. It's the same root. I recently read something that said that spirituality has to do with the connectedness of all things. And that's been the best thing that I'd like to know. I think of breath, and the breath is what connects us with the world. What do you think, Sarah? I have a whole other slight on that. Somebody recently yelled at me very loudly for using the word religious.

[11:29]

And I actually... And Kurt? But I remember once telling you that, very emphatically, in a moment of intensity, we have to go beyond witchcraft to religion. And when I think of religious, I think of the religious impulse. And I don't think of organized religion. And there's a tendency for us in America, and probably Europe too, to think of the church, I mean, which we are turning away from. And I don't use the word that way myself. Okay. What was the, what would Bhagavan say, Rajneesh? I mean, he had a lot of people doing something. Was it religious? Was it spiritual? They looked like they were having a good time. I saw a film of... Uh-huh.

[12:35]

Okay. Suzuki Roshi said, Zen is religion before religion. I like that. That's what I mean. He didn't add, go beyond witchcraft. Okay. Well, I'm asking you these questions because I want to know, and also I think that we should know what we're doing. In other words, the words we use influence. what we are practicing. And so, you know, when I talked to Kaz about it, he said, well, we have a word shukyo, S-H-U-U-K-Y-O, and it means art, philosophy, culture and religion.

[13:58]

He said, but it comes from Europe. We had no idea of art, culture, philosophy or religion before European ideas. Isn't that amazing? They made no... And this is... I think you can see something about the West in this. It's because they made no distinction between craft and art. It's just you did something. There was suddenly this was a nice bowl and this was art. This was a good drawing and this suddenly was art. They didn't make that distinction. that there's this other elevated version. Of course, they knew, they prized some things more than others, but they didn't have this mysterious element of a state of art. And culture is actually a quite recent word. I think it's, even in the West, it's 1700s, I believe, when it was first used, that you notice that what you're doing is called culture.

[15:04]

It's just what you did. I can't remember the date exactly, but it's a date for it. And the idea of a distinction between philosophy and religion is Western, because everything is philosophy, a sort of philosophy, because it's all true. None of it's based on belief. So you might have a distinction between Buddhism and Confucianism, but it would be like a distinction between one philosophy and another philosophy, not a distinction between a religion and a philosophy. And all the teachings were meant to be verifiable in experience or through reason and so forth. So it seems to, as far as I could tell by questioning both Jeffrey and Kaz, is that character, your character and your personality and your mind are not distinguishable really from religion and spirit.

[16:23]

Is that they're kind of different emphases of the same thing, and there's gradations, there's realization, there's a fuller and fuller capacity for character, personality, seeing how things really are. I mean, I'm just, I don't know exactly, I'm just telling you what I get from having lived in the Orient, practiced with Asian teachers, but also from just probing this for half an hour or so with Jeffrey and Kaz, who know Japanese and Tibetan religious language about as well as anybody does. What? Janie, what do you think? Yeah. She wants in, do you think? Yeah. She's smart anyway.

[17:25]

She knows how to talk to Randy. That's why he's the director. He knows what the dogs are saying. We've got a regular dog pack out there now. I'm having a moral problem because when I first came here, I had no relationship to Janie really much anymore, but she comes every morning and either barks outside my window or comes around the door and wants a dog biscuit. So I give her a dog biscuit every morning at a particular time. She's got the time down very... But now there's three dogs. Do I give all three a dog biscuit? Or do I only give Janie a dog biscuit? Am I being mean to the other two? Or am I going to have three dogs camping in my doorstep all the time? This is one of these problems where there's impermanence, suffering, and not impersonal.

[18:26]

Now, Jeffrey said that... Jeffrey Hopkins, by the way, for those of you who aren't familiar with Buddhist literature, literature is just about the main writer and translator of books from Tibetan into English, and often the translator of the Dalai Lama. And his books are wonderful. He's working now, he says, on a book that will be out in a couple of years on Yogacara. But Jeffrey says that there are considered to be three levels of what could be equivalent to religion in the West. And the first is a sense of reincarnation. Now, as Jeffrey says, what this means in practice is a depth of identity that could extend to another life, or a depth of identity that extends to other people.

[19:43]

That's quite good, I think. And the second one is samsara, which means a relationship to suffering in yourself and others. And third is a recognition of your identity with everyone and with each person you meet. Now, none of these three are spiritual exactly. And they're not religion as a church, that's religion as an institution. And I think this is pretty close to what I would say is a religious feeling in the positive sense and not as an institution. Which is a sense of, I would say in the West, religion in the positive sense means a sense of a worldview and how the individual fits into it and a sense of a larger identity or continuum of being.

[20:50]

Yes? There, for the grace of God, go I. I mean, it's all three of them. Mm-hmm. That's good. I often think that when I see people on the street who are totally in a mess, I think, there but for a gene, go I. Well, when you'd walk with him, there'd be people on the street, and someone would say, you got some spirit change? Give spirit change to anyone who would ask him. And I was walking with him one time, and he was doing this, and I said, well, He says, I got this money just for that. And he said, that's what they're asking for. And you can give them what it is that they're asking for. And they need so much. And they're just asking for a little change. And he says, there's so many people I love. And I've been on the street with people I love who are on the street. And he says, what I can do is just carry some money. And he went away and skipped himself. Yeah, I know.

[21:52]

When I was in New York recently, there's so many homeless now that I finally was saying to them, you know, there's a limit to spare change. And they were laughing about it, you know, and it became, it was great to see that they weren't so serious about it, one way or the other, whether you gave to them or not. Because, I mean, actually there was a finite limit I began to run out of. I even said to one guy, all I have is a $50 bill. Oh, don't give me that, he said. Because I'd given away everything. It was smaller than that. It was great. Don't give me that. He said, no, no. And some I'd met several times. I was in the same neighborhood. I'd keep meeting the same guy. He said, oh, you've paid once. It's okay. So in these three qualities in the three levels,

[23:01]

in what Jeffrey said roughly equate to what we mean by religious, as he understands it, means you do something about it. Not just that you recognize it, but that a religious person is someone who does begin to develop the character, identity that extends to others. And the religious person is one who, recognizing suffering, puts themselves in relationship to others in terms of suffering. As this son did. And third would be, of course, the bodhisattva vow. Recognition and doing something about it. Putting yourself in relationship to each person as also you. Now, in Zen they say, killing the Buddha.

[24:05]

Kill the Buddha. Or, you know, the emphasis in Zen on breaking through conventional understanding. This is... Or also the koan, what about... What about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? Which also means conventional reality or usual way of perception or religion. Umma, young man said, body exposed in the golden wind. So, I don't know how much time we have now because Oh, okay. Give it a little time. I don't know if I could come to uncorrected mind.

[25:08]

Now, I made a distinction between satori... And we can't sort this out altogether, but I suppose I was roughly equating satori as an entry into spiritual life, using a Western word. Now what we have here, of course, is that the problem is you have... these teachings are in bottles, shall we say, words in Tibetan and Japanese and Chinese and practices and words and designations. And we take those and we pour them into Western bottles. There's no way to avoid a mutant in words. And you get something from one bottle and it pours into English into three bottles. And then you have something quite different. And how do we sort that out and put it back together? Now, what's the point of me discussing this if originally distinctions between religion and spiritual are not made?

[26:26]

Well, because I do think we're going to have to deal with the bottles these teachings get poured into. And then you, I guess you have to, it gets poured in the bottles and then you have to dump all the bottles on yourself. Maybe you're doing sashimi, that's what you're doing, you're taking one bottle after another and dumping it on yourself. You're sitting there all drenched. Okay. So, my feeling is that we're talking here about a process of, I mean, I think I could use the word, maturation. And I think the Dalai Lama says that the mind must become dharma.

[27:35]

It's not that dharma becomes mind, but mind becomes dharma. which means you start with mind, not with the teaching. And the beginning is to study the mind. And when you talk about spirituality in Japanese, the closest you can come to it is something like way-seeking mind, Dogen's idea. Again, they talk about mind in a certain way, but when they talk about mind, they mean mind that's larger than personality, identity, or thinking, and so forth. So this word mind covers in its fullest experiential or experienced reality, experienced quality, I don't dare say nature, covers what we mean by spiritual. But also this mind won't be developed if you don't also cover what we mean by religious.

[28:40]

Now, I think that when you are noticing or practicing at Sashin or Zazen or any time, you may find yourself crying. Just out of some relief or some... sense of the imponderable or messy or mixed up or whatever qualities of your own life and the qualities of all of our lives. The helplessness, seemingly helplessness of so many people. And when you do that, I would say that through this you're identifying with people, and I would say this is actually a religious, I would put this in the category of a religious feeling. But when you're sitting, you're identifying with others, you're opening your heart to others and to yourself.

[29:51]

But when you're sitting sometimes and you feel an immense ease and clarity, Nothing's the matter in any way. You just feel exactly where you are and everything is perhaps quite bright and clear and in place. In that, I would say, you're more opening the door to a spiritual sense of life. So if we think of the Dharma door being the Four Noble Truths, and as I've sometimes said, the Four Noble Truths being four windows in this dharma door. You look through one window, you look through another window, and the more you see each appearance as arising, each appearance that arises, you see through these four windows, then I think you're able to open this door.

[30:57]

and opening this door, or seeing things in this way, you are entering way-seeking mind, or entering the path of the Dharma, or exposing yourself in the golden wind. Now, to expose yourself in the golden wind is a rather interesting idea, because it's not the same idea as satori, which is like you open a door and you're, hmm, this looks great, this is a nice place. but that you enter that place and that place matures you. You're exposing yourself in the golden wind when the tree withers and the leaves fall. When you begin to see everything marked by emptiness, by impermanence, by suffering, by... It's larger than personal Okay.

[32:11]

So by seeing the wondrous interdependence of everything, connectedness of everything, you mature yourself. By seeing the pain and suffering that arises on things, you're maturing yourself. By being in clarity, you're maturing yourself. By bringing these together in a sense of path, where you feel you can't reach the end of it and at the same time everything you are can go into it, you're maturing yourself. Now, I'd say practice is, in this sense that I'm emphasizing now, a way to mature yourself. In the spiritual world and in the... mundane world.

[33:21]

Now, again, Geoffrey says that the Tibetan government was meant to be simultaneously and I can't think of the word, interdependently or something like that. The Tibetan government was meant to be, as it's conceived, a government of the spiritual world as well as a government of the mundane world. I'm very wary of governments who try to do this. But in a sense you can reverse it and say you, on each action, mature yourself when each action recognizes, in our language, the spiritual world and the ordinary world. But maybe we should say the spiritual and religious worlds and the ordinary world. Now, I believe Bhagavan says that Zen... I said said, I don't know.

[34:25]

If it's just something you said or something, he really emphasized that Zen was the ultimate religion. And in this case, I suppose he meant that Zen is the seed or the purely spiritual side of religion. And there's some truth to that. But I think when you look at Buddhism as a whole, as a teaching, it's maturing you in a golden wind or in a breeze, in a wind that is both the religious sense of a larger beingness, and your spiritual sense of being in a deeper... I don't know, I can't find the words for this. Now, all of this is put together in the word emptiness. So emptiness is a practice through which you mature yourself as a Buddha, through which you put on Buddha's clothes. Now, emptiness is also... takes the...

[35:30]

takes the form of different doors or gates or practices or words, finding itself in words. For instance, beginner's mind is a word for emptiness. Uncorrected state of mind is a word for emptiness. Unfabricated mind is a word for emptiness. Original mind is a word for emptiness. But they each are somewhat different doors and different... By that I mean different approaches to this. Impermanent is a word for emptiness. In other words, you may not be able to see this stick as impermanent, but you can see it... I mean, excuse me. You may not be able to see this stick as empty. That's hard to do. But you can see it as impermanent. It's got quite a lot of nicks. In fact, it's got some incense burns on it that were Sukhiroshi. This is the stick he gave me.

[36:37]

And I put some dents in it. Anyway, you can see the stick is impermanent, but it's difficult to see it as empty. But when you practice with seeing it as impermanent, you're beginning to see it as empty. Does that make sense? In other words, you're giving emptiness a close. Or something like that. You're seeing form in terms of the attributes that when you see it more deeply, you realize emptiness. Okay, let me take just a little bit more time and see if I can give you a feeling for what uncorrected mind means. Because here now, I'm trying to give you a view of Buddhist practice that will help you sustain your practice, particularly in your lay life.

[37:47]

You can just practice uncorrected state of mind. But particularly if you have an analytical intelligence or you start saying, well, jeez, how does that fit in with... Then we can try to make the picture a little clearer. And the best I can do is, let's imagine a house of many rooms. And in fact, I would say that for most people... The whole world is a bunch of rooms. There's no outside. That's all insides. When we dump nuclear waste somewhere, we're treating the world as a room, where we know, like you stick the garbage out in the greenhouse, that's a room. We know what happens to it. So when we stick nuclear waste in Karl's worst cavern, Karl's bad cavern, we are treating it like it was a room when we clear-cut forest.

[38:54]

Or even when we... Just the idea of nature. I mean, I think Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, was the first to really talk about scenery, seeing the Swiss mountains, Lake Geneva and so on. So our view of nature as a kind of thing is seeing it as a room. We see it in our own terms, which is as a room. So, let's imagine we're all living in this house and there's different rooms. And if I say to you, practice uncorrected state of mind, that's a room. Because uncorrected state of mind is words and is a correction. Okay, it's like I said yesterday, standing in front of a blackboard, it's not an empty blackboard, it's still a blackboard. So when you first... But it's a lot like if you've got the sense that impermanent is a word for emptiness, but we can experience something as impermanent where a direct experience of emptiness is quite a different thing.

[40:07]

You can have, and I hope you do have a direct experience of emptiness, but that's not the same as an experience of impermanence. But impermanence is in the same room. Okay, so when Sukhiroshi talks about beginner's mind, he's talking about something that we all have. You don't know how to bowl, and you go bowling, and you get four strikes in a row, and everybody says, boy, that was beginner's mind. And some people go to Sesshin or Zazen, and they don't know anything about Buddhism, but they get, because they don't have too many ideas. So what we're saying, what Sukhash is saying by that is, you can have access to uncorrected state of mind if you just can quit being an expert and see things freshly, do things freshly. Okay, so when you're practicing, uncorrected state of mind is a background quality in your practice.

[41:17]

that I may give you various things to do, like see each thing that appears in terms of the Four Noble Truths. But if you look more carefully at this, this way of seeing is based on uncorrected mind. But uncorrected mind is hard to do because it's a correction, how do you not correct? But you can see things in terms of suffering, or in terms of clarity, and so forth. Independence. Then let's take unfabricated mind. Maybe by the time you have been in these rooms, the room of suffering, the room of clarity, and you begin to feel uncorrected state of mind, you suddenly see in the middle of the house there's a courtyard open to the sky. Perhaps we could call that unfabricated mind. But it's hard to get to that point of unfabricated mind because... you're in these different rooms.

[42:20]

But if you practice each room as seeing impermanence, etc., you begin to practice, or in the background you're practicing uncorrected mind. You're trying not to correct your breath. But you do correct your breath sometimes, and trying not to correct your breath is a correction. So all of this is a kind of negotiation. And in the background in Zen practice of every instruction is meditation. the freedom from the instruction, or uncorrected mind. You're correcting, but then at the same time you have a sense of not correcting, you correct a little bit, but the basic practice is uncorrected mind. And then in a deeper sense we could say, if I just use these words, you come to unfabricated mind, mind that begins to arise without fabrication. Then we can talk about primordial mind, perhaps. And by that time you're outside the house, the courtyard is everywhere and there aren't rooms anymore.

[43:20]

But you got to that by this background practice of uncorrected mind, which is a kind of correction, and pretty soon no correction is necessary. Now, original mind... would be that sense of primordial mind appearing, because original implies before, appearing as appearance. So now you're not seeing appearance and seeing impermanence, appearance arises from emptiness or original mind. So this is still, you're in this territory. Sometimes you experience this, sometimes you don't, sometimes you remind yourself that things are impermanent, sometimes you find them, they appear from emptiness. Now, when I see something as impermanent, I'm seeing emptiness at a graspable level.

[44:25]

When I see something from an uncorrected point of view, I'm seeing it more at a non-graspable level. So that one of the differences between a specific practice, it may be the same, but one is at a graspable level and one is at a more non-graspable level. And these two, the graspable level and the non-graspable level, can exist simultaneously. You notice one or the other more. Now, one of the things that begins to happen is you begin to find your identity at the moment of co-emergence of form and emptiness. Or something arising. So when appearance and emptiness, when you both see it as appear and you sense it as emptiness and you feel that moment of co-emergence, this is a more refined stage of practice.

[45:31]

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